News & Highlights of 2011 - 2012

Wolfgang Lutz addresses “birth rate” tensions in keynote

Wolfgang Lutz, leader of IIASA’s World Population Program and Director of the Wittgenstein Centre, in a lecture, “Starting a family in times of decreased fertility,” addressed the tension between the medical goal of “more live births” and the goal expressed by a Royal Society Committee of bringing down the global birth rate. The 2 July lecture was to more than 9,000 people attending the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Istanbul, Turkey.

Marcin Stonawski and colleagues win EAPS Poster Award

The European Association for Population Studies (EAPS) awarded the “Poster Award for the Best Poster Presented at EPC2012” to IIASA’s Marcin Stonawski, Vegard Skirbekk, Michaela Potancokova (and colleagues from Pew Research Center) for their article Religious demography of emerging economies. The paper, presented at the European Population Conference 2012, discusses the demographic characteristics of religion in Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and the related possible global consequences of increasing economic and human capital in these nations.

7 billion people are not the issue - human development is what counts Amid concerns about the capacity of the planet to support more people, a panel of population and development experts argue that it is not the number of people that is of concern, but more so their age, education, health status, and location that is most relevant to sustainability. Their recommendations are outlined in The Laxenburg Declaration, a statement coordinated by IIASA and prepared for submission to Rio+20. More

Publication AWARD:

the following paper by: Crespo Cuaresma, Lutz, Abbasi-Shavazi: Demography, Education and Democracy: Global Trends and the Case of Iran. Population and Development Review 36 (2), 2010, pp.253-281.

won the WU Best Paper Award 2011 of Category 3 (foreign business communication, law, humanities, sociology, commercial geography, interdisciplinary works).

CONGRATULATIONS!

The Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital Symposium officially opened on 29th September at the Austrian Parliament. The event, involving several hundred scientists, academics and policy advisors explores the relationship between demography, education, and democracy across continents and cultures. Participants discussed the potential benefits of refocusing international development priorities toward education and health. More

IIASA, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Vienna University of Economics and Business have established the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital. Funded in part through ERC Grants and the Wittgenstein 2010 Award, the Centre aims to provide the first ever global projections of populations by age, sex, education level, labor force participation and health. More

News & Highlights of 2010

Demographic Data Sheets

The European Demographic Data Sheet 2010 and Asian Demographic & Human Capital Data Sheet 2008 are available online (download as PDF).
Click here for more information about the Asian Demographic and Human Capital Data Sheet 2008

New article in Science

Due to increasing life-spans and improving health many populations are ‘aging’ more slowly than conventional measures indicate. As published in Science (10 Sep), IIASA scientists have developed new measures of aging that take disability and longevity into account.
More

Wolfgang Lutz is the recipient of the Wittgenstein Award for 2010. Also known as the “Austro Nobel” it is the highest science prize in Austria and it is the first time it has been awarded to a social scientist. The award recognizes exceptional research by scientists who occupy a prominent place in the international scientific community. More

In Memoriam: Nathan Keyfitz 1913 – 2010

Nathan Keyfitz, leader of IIASA's Population Program from 1983 to 1991 and IIASA Deputy Director during 1992, passed away on April 6, 2010, at the age of 96. Keyfitz was one of the giants of demography. He is credited for developing the field of mathematical demography and at IIASA he also pioneered the application of demographic methods to several other fields.

Nathan came to IIASA in 1983 from Harvard University, where he was the Andelot Professor of Sociology Emeritus. Previously, he had been a professor at the University of Toronto (1959-1963), the University of Chicago (1963-1968), and the University of California, Berkeley (1968-1972).

It was at Chicago that Nathan began to apply mathematical tools and computer technology to the analysis of demographic data. In 1968 he published his groundbreaking Introduction to the Mathematics of Population that described his methodology.

At IIASA he increasingly applied these demographic methods to areas outside of demography as he flourished in IIASA’s interdisciplinary atmosphere in areas such as sustainable development and foreign aid. Much of the work IIASA’s Population Program is doing today – from applications of the multi-state model to probabilistic population projections to population-environment analysis – has its roots in Nathan’s creative ideas.

After leading IIASA's Population Program, Nathan became an Institute Scholar from 1992 to 1993, and served as IIASA's Deputy Director from April to October 1992, when he led the organization of the major 1992 IIASA conference on the challenges for systems analysis in the nineties and beyond. Nathan also established an association for IIASA alumni, known as the IIASA Society, which today has nearly 900 members.

Nathan, who was married to Beatrice (Orkin) Keyfitz from 1939 until her death in October 2009, had two children, Barbara and Robert.

We were privileged to have him at IIASA and we will always treasure his memory. He was exceedingly dedicated to IIASA and an incredibly kind and humble person given his seminal contributions to research.

A memorial service honoring the life of Nathan Keyfitz will be held at 1 p.m. on April 13 at the Bigelow Chapel in Mount Auburn Cemetery (580 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA). More

An online guestbook for personal condolences can be found at Boston.com

Wolfgang Lutz, Nebojsa Nakicenovic and Detlof von Winterfeldt

News & Highlights of 2009

2009 Mattei Dogan Award to Wolfgang Lutz

At the IUSSP's International Population Conference, attended by 2,300 demographers, IIASA's Wolfgang Lutz gave a plenary talk on the role demographers play in understanding population and climate change. The keynote speech marked the presentation of the 2009 Mattei Dogan Award to Lutz who will use the prize to fund the training of a young African demographer at IIASA.

Vegard Skirbekk has been awarded the European Research Council's European Starting Independent Researcher Grant. The five-year study on the demography of skills and beliefs in Europe will look at how factors such as productivity, attitudes, and beliefs will change in Europe in the next 50 years.
More

News archives (2001-2008)

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Last updated: 04 Jul 2012